Williams won’t sign with Hoosiers

I’ve spoken with Dwight Williams, the father of Florida wing David Williams, a couple of times on the phone today. Though Dwight is busy dealing with work, he did say that David will not sign a letter of intent with Indiana during the early signing period, which begins tomorrow.

David should have time to explain his decision soon, Dwight said.

Williams committed to Indiana back in April shortly after receiving an offer.

As of now, Indiana expects only a signed letter from Maryland wing Victor Oladipo. Another Florida prospect, Will Sheehey, is the other prospect Indiana could land.

Seemed like a nice kid, but I think he saw the writing on the wall regarding playing time and decided to pursue a less “challenging” environment with lower expectations, i.e. Florida International is a definite possibility.

Louisville Talking-Head, Rick Bozich, is gloating over the fact that he called Crean out on this one about six months ago. Watch out IU, the Louisville Talking-Head is a snake in the grass ready to bite Crean’s work in order to improve the Talking_head’s ratings. This is actually a sad story rather than a plus for IU when Williams plays elsewhere. Crean said that our opponents can take their shots now while we are rebuilding and he just gave them more ammunition in the Williams recruiting fiasco.

We can speculate all day, but it’s kind of pointless until the kid gives his side of the story. Maybe he decided to go to prep school. Maybe there’s a family issue causing him to need to stay closer to home. Or maybe he just changed his mind, like 18 year olds are prone to do sometimes. Who knows?

In the end, I don’t think it helps IU much because other coaches will spin it against them. I also doubt that this kid is really that weak of a prospect. I’m sure the IU staff put in a lot of time scouting him before they made their decision to offer him a scholarship.

Are any of you aware that two guys on Howard University’s team are from Pike high school..This team could give us a good battle on Friday night….Schools all over the country recruit from Indiana..Twenty-eight posts on this thread making a big issue out of a 2-star kid from Florida that probably can’t stack up to the top 50 ballers in Indy Metro. I truly believe this was not a recruit..It was a Florida vacation for Crean.

I sure hope that IU did not pull Williams’ scholarship offer. Regardless of what you think about Williams as a player, it is generally not considered an acceptable or normal practice to pull an offer after a recruit has accepted it. If you’re not going to stick to your commitment to give a kid a scholarship, you shouldn’t offer that scholarship. Just because some recruits back out of their commitments doesn’t mean that it’s okay for coaches do the same to other recruits. In the unfortunate situations where coaches have pulled scholarship offers, they sometimes have been barred by high school coaches from any future recruiting at that school.

I agree with ‘new coke’ – let’s ‘buy local.’ This year with 7 of the top 10 players either from Indiana, Ohio, or Illinois I’d say that Crean is moving in the right direction. Nothing against kids from elsewhere (this means you Victor O) but in-state recruiting leads to a sustainably strong base of kids who grow up wanting to play at IU.

This Williams thing is a big “Whew!” as far as I am concerned. If you are Bill Lynch, a two-star commit is almost like winning the lottery; after scaring away 3 and 4 star recruits by losing winnable games, it is fortunate that two star guys still want to come here and not play for Ball State, Evansville, or Eastern Kentucky.

For the basketball program, a two star is a veritable insult. As if the constant stream of 3 stars isn’t hard enough to swallow.